The Rise Of Civilization

9 Comments

We're talking about the most enduring of all PC games. A game that predates the 200 issues and 15 years of PC Gamer, and that has helped define what PC gaming is. A game that has adapted and evolved, remaining not just relevant, but essential.

Its template was crafted by its original designer, the name above the title, the man who has become synonymous with PC strategy games. The game is Civilization. The man is Sid Meier.

When Sid started work on the first Civilization back in 1989, the initial inspiration came from two key games of the era: Sid's own Railroad Tycoon, and a certain city-building game by Will Wright.

"I was playing SimCity," Sid confirms, "which was one of the first games that was really about building and creating things as opposed to blowing them up."

Railroad Tycoon had that same creative impulse. It featured would-be barons building a railroad empire, starting with one train and a single track. It was a fresh take on strategy. The good news: "It worked," Sid says. "Especially when we started adding things like finance and competition." Searching for another subject to apply these ideas to, Sid and the rest of the team at Microprose came to the conclusion that "the history of the world seemed like a good place to go."

Turning 6,000 years of human history into a game wasn't quite the giant leap it at first appears. "Part of it," Sid says, "was actually that we'd played SimCity and thought, 'OK, what's bigger than a city - the whole world!' We'd all played Risk, and a game called Empire, so we had the idea that the world was manageable if we approached it in a certain way." Ironically, one game Sid hadn't played was the Francis Tresham-designed city- and nation-building boardgame Civilization, set around the classical Mediterranean, although others at Microprose had. Tresham's earlier game '1829' helped inspire Railroad Tycoon.

The development process for Civilization was all about prototyping. An early version was up and running in the time it would now take a team to choose the font for the design document. "We actually had something playable within a couple of weeks of talking about the idea," Sid says, "and from then on it was constant iteration. Almost every day or two I'd have a new version and Bruce Shelley, who was my producer partner on the game, would play it." This pattern would continue for the next year or so, with every new version tested to see whether what was added improved the game or not.

The earliest pieces of the Civilization jigsaw to fall into place were the more traditional board- and wargame aspects: cities, units, combat. Technologies were an early addition as they provided the drive for a civilisation's advance through the game's massive timeframe. But as the team added, they subtracted. "We actually took out a number of features," Sid says. "We had a whole second level of technology. I remember beer drinking was somewhere in our alternate technology tree. Other elements, such as the Wonders of the World and government models were added to keep challenging the player. "We were also evolving the AI at the time," Sid remembers, "because that was part of what made it interesting."

'Interesting' isn't a word you'd associate with gaming today, where more urgent, catchy terms are used to attract, such as 'dynamic', 'thrilling' or 'visceral'. But 'interesting' is a charming and yet entirely appropriate description for the unique quality that Civilization has. It's something that clearly stems from Sid himself. "We have a philosophy of 'interesting decisions'," he explains. "Each decision has a couple of variables that change based on the current situation. If you're in a war it might tilt your decision-making a different way than if you're aiming for an economic victory. There's never obviously one best path with the others there to take up space. It's more that each path you could go down has something interesting about it that might make sense in a certain situation."

There's one aspect of the Civilization series that's crucial to this interesting decision-making, an aspect that helps make Civilization so immersive even though it seems distinctly old fashioned and potentially distancing - the fact that it's turn-based. "It gives you time to think about your decisions, which allows us to give you more interesting things to think about," Sid says.

"If you've only got three seconds to make a decision, it can't be a very complicated decision," he reasons. "However, if you can take as much time as you want, you can start to trade off economic versus military versus political versus culture. All of a sudden you're thinking, 'Well, what if I built this?'" Having that time to imagine immerses you.

So in a sense, the player in Civilization is filling in those gaps between the turns with their thinking, making it a real-time world in their head? "Yes, you're playing in real-time," Sid agrees, "but you have the time that you need to plan and you don't feel rushed. It doesn't make sense in a game that covers 6,000 years of history for you to feel rushed."

As development on Civilization continued, further elements were added, including those that drag down many a burgeoning civilisation: pollution and unhappiness. But they didn't quite work out. "I think if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn't do them," Sid admits. "It became more work than fun, but at the time it added to the seriousness of the game, helped make it successful... People felt they were learning a little bit more about the world and that it might be good for their kids to play."

With its historical theme, Civilization has always had something of a whiff of education about it, even if Sid and the Microprose team had no grand ambitions in this area. "We weren't trying to convince you that nuclear energy was a good or bad idea, or that this form of government was better than that," Sid says. "It was not our intent to espouse any political philosophy."

And far from being a educational fact-fest turned game, Civilization was practically the opposite. "We did some research but one of the jokes around here is that we do the research after the game is over, just to justify whatever we decided to put in," Sid admits. "A lot of the decisions we make are about what's most fun for the player and then we can always find some historical fact to justify whatever it is."

When it was first released in 1991, Civilization was a slow burn with sales growing gradually as word of mouth spread. "We would get letters," Sid says, "from gamers describing how they started playing at five in the afternoon and at three in the morning they realised they were still playing."

As the months and years rolled on, the feedback from the growing community of Civilization players kept coming, bringing home to Sid how powerful the idea of being a game designer was. "Most of the letters we'd get were almost a standard form," he explains. "They were like, 'Dear Sid. I liked your game Civilization. Here are the five things I would change to make it a much better game.'" These armchair designers would get their chance with the release of 1996's Civilization II.

A former number one in PC Gamer's Top 100, Civilization II built upon what worked in the original, and improved the graphics and sound in line with the five years' of technical advances between them. But, just as with the first Civilization, not every idea made it into the final release. "One of our initial designs was to have minigame battles," Sid reveals. "We prototyped that and found that it totally stopped the flow of the game. It really detracted from keeping you in the moment, from your role as overall leader."

It's an intriguing insight into Sid's design philosophy, that this switch from the strategic to the tactical, between two different mindsets, was rejected. "If you're playing at the strategy level, you've got a couple of things being built and you've just discovered this new civilisation and you're wondering what they going to do. Jumping into a tactical game, you mentally unload all this information, load in some new information, do that, then try to get the old stuff back again! It's just a better game without that extra level of complexity."

Speaking of complexity, Civilization II - in response to player feedback - attempted to include more and more leaders, units and civs. "We tried to satisfy some of those requests," Sid explains, "but I think we learned that more is not always better. Finding the limitations of what the player could deal with before it stopped being fun was one of the main things we learned in Civ II."

The longest-lasting innovation introduced in Civilization II was modding, fulfilling the ambitions of many of those who wrote letters to Sid. Fuelled by players creating new mods and maps kept the game alive for years, with the most popular additions making it into official expansion packs. That creativity surfaced in other ways too, as players analysed the systems at work in the game, and invented tactics - such as the infamous Infinite City Sprawl (where players decimate landscapes with vast urban sprawls) - which were never conceived by Sid and lead designer Brian Reynolds. "The problem was, as designers, we played the game the way we intended it to be played," Sid admits. "We didn't try these strange strategies."

Five years elapsed before Civilization III in 2001. Much had changed behind the scenes. Sid, with longtime collaborators Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs, had left Microprose to found Firaxis - they'd already released the Civ-in-space-like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Meanwhile competitors Activision released Civilization: Call To Power I and II. Legal tussles over who actually owned the brand name Civilization meant lawsuits and settlements, with Sid at Firaxis no more than an interested onlooker. "We never expected to work on Civ again because of the whole corporate situation," Sid says. When the dust settled, the rights to the Civilization name finished with Infogrames/Atari. They in turn approached Firaxis to build Civilization III.

"Civ III was a homecoming for us," Sid says. "It was all the ideas that we'd thought of over the years, things we'd picked up from the community - I know at one time we had a 200 page document with all the suggestions we'd got - and huge leaps in technology, stretching the Civilization template with things we hadn't done before."

But therein lay a potential danger. As he'd learned on Civilization II, more could mean less when it came to how enjoyable a game was to play. "We looked back on the flight simulator genre which had gone before," Sid remembers. "Flight simulators started off as easy but after a number of years they became incredibly complex. If you hadn't played Falcon 5 then you really had no chance of figuring out Falcon 6."

"We could clearly make a Civilization of however much complexity we wanted to," Sid continues, "but that wasn't necessarily the right answer. Civ III grew a fair amount... We felt we reached the complexity limit with Civ III. Computers had gotten to the point where they could totally overwhelm a player - with Civ I we knew we were finished because we ran out of memory! [Laughs] By the time we got to Civ III, we had to figure out on our own where to draw the line."

That line embraced a new culture system, new buildings with new functions, a deeper military system, and some of the prettiest 2D graphics ever seen in a strategy game. It also continued Civilization II's success with the mod community, producing mods like the excellent Rhye's & Fall.

For all its success, though, Civilization III now seems like a waypoint on the journey towards even greater glories. Civilization IV is the culmination of the design developments across the whole Civilization series, building on the discoveries of, and learning from the blind alleys ventured down by the previous Civs, their expansions, mods and the many games inspired by them. It is the game where the potential of the ideas at the heart of Civilization were fully realised.

With Civilization IV, gamers could choose to play as a scientific, cultural or economic power and genuinely compete with those traditional Civ bullies, the warriors. And it is a game that can be played properly against human opponents. It is nothing less than a masterpiece. "Multiplayer had been a goal from the beginning," Sid says. "A lot of the testing was done in multiplayer mode during development, which added a different flavour. There was a lot of focus on balance as when you have four or five people playing they're very sensitive, so there was a lot of time spent on the game rules."

Civilization IV also filled out other areas, introducing separate religions as a major factor, and replacing a few government models with a flexible civics system - an idea Sid had toyed with in Alpha Centauri. Even more flexible, the myriad new unit promotions - where you could turn warriors into specialist city raiders if you were so minded, or give catapults the ability to cause near genocidal levels of civilian deaths.

Just as importantly, Civilization IV stripped out a masses of micromanagement. "We wanted to introduce some of these bigger concepts. To do that we had take out some of these things that were happening at a lower level." So, out went pollution, saving an enormous amount of endgame worker drudgery, and out went corruption and waste. Civilisations could manage, leaving you with the more important decisions.

Looking back across all four Civilization games, and the 14 years they span between them, the striking thing is not how different they all are but just how similar they feel. "We were amazed by how much some relatively small changes could affect the game," Sid agrees. "We were playing with the amount of food or the amount of resources that would come out of a certain square and just a small change there had a really profound effect on the game. That caused us to be pretty careful about change to the fundamental system and that's probably why there's a consistent feeling to all the games."

One thing there has never been any question of changing is the Civilization series' turn-based play. For Sid, the reasoning is straightforward. "We're giving the player enough things to think about, to anticipate, to plan, that they're drawn into the game and feel that they're in control. That's a fundamental goal of ours - are you playing the game or is the game playing you? Are you in control and thinking ahead or are you always one step behind and trying to figure out how you can catch up with the game?"

The great trick that all the Civilizations have pulled off is to combine the abstract with the tangible. They have melded the almost impossibly ambitious concept of covering 6,000 years of history, yet keeping the player focused on the movement of simple, understandable concepts. "You never feel you don't understand the rules," Sid says, "but they interact with each other to create problems that really make you think and that's what draws you in." Game design sounds so easy when it's explained by Sid Meier - playing the Civilization series makes you realise what a profound and subtle craft it really is.

Chris Buxton